July 2010

ShareMyPlaylists.com provides us with another in their series of excellent playlist posts. You can check out thousands of playlists at ShareMyPlaylists.com – they’ve got a little something for everyone.

Strictly BASS… Part Five
We hit the ground running this month with the latest in this brilliant series of bulky bass line inspired playlists from syknyk. This month’s the tunes playing havoc with you boom box include Radio 1’s Toddla T, dubstep producer de jour Rusko and Boy 8-Bit.

Undiscovered Prince
The Purple One is back with a new album, 20Ten, which he once again decided to give away for free in some daily rag or other, and to celebrate SMP’s head honcho kieron has put together this brilliant playlist which, in his own words, is “dedicated to some of the best tracks to come out of Paisley Park over the years.” A must for all Prince fans featuring album tracks, remixes and B-sides.

A Song A Day 2010
This is a great concept for a playlist which, as the name suggests, features a song added every day during 2010. Click here for a song to suit every mood. Is your boss giving you trouble? Morrissey – Little Man, What Now? Girlfriend just dumped you? Sinead O’Connor – Nothing Compares 2 U. Do you think you left the iron on at home? Beck – It’s All In Your Mind.

We’ve been fans of Facebook for a long time now, so much so that we looked to them for inspiration when building our own social features.

Yesterday they reached a big milestone, 500 million users, and to celebrate they’re collecting stories from their users and asking which ones inspire them. We’re happy to take a small part in this and we’re asking our users to share their music stories with the new Stories tab on our Facebook page.

So if you’ve found a new favourite band after seeing them in your friend’s top artists, attended an amazing festival or maybe you even found love after someone dropped a track in your Spotify inbox – please feel free to share the story.

Mercury Prize nominated Foals recently released their sophomore album, Total Life Forever, to rave reviews. The album was recorded during late 2009 at Svenska Grammofon Studion in Gothenburg, Sweden, by Luke Smith (Clor), and was mixed by wild man Alan Moulder in London 2010.

By choosing to record in the labyrinthine Svenska Grammofon Studion, the band were intent on
ridding themselves of distractions. Isolated but close-knit, they worked for two months, honing
their dynamic musicality. Be sure to check out the video for a little insight into the making of the album.

Additionally, Spotify Premium listeners can check out a bonus edition of the new album with two additional tracks and an interview with the band.

Colorado electronic duo Sean Foreman and Nathaniel ‘Nat’ Motte, better known as 3OH!3, have been hard at work putting together the follow-up to their 2008 album, Want.

‘Streets of Gold’ is the second album from the band, who have already sold more than 600,000 singles in the UK. Their second single ‘Starstrukk’ (feat. Katy Perry) spent 10 weeks on the top ten and has sold over 500,000 copies.

Monarchy continue to break new ground and are today giving Spotify’s users exclusive access to a new track contained within their augmented reality iPhone app. Download the Monarchy app from the App Store, then visit the Spotify homepage (or download the app and take a close up picture of the image posted here from the Vault) between now and Sunday to access the Tim Goldsworthy remix of the band’s forthcoming single Love Get Out Of My Way.

As if that wasn’t enough, you can also sample 4 tracks from the band’s highly anticipated album (or 5 tracks if you’re a Spotify Premium user!).

Littering his lyrics with wry pop culture references, a sharp sense of humour and an honesty rarely found in rap music right now, Professor Green is one of the most exciting talents to emerge in 2010. With the UK charts increasingly full of MCs, now, more than ever, pop is ready for an artist that does more than merely rap well.

His long-awaited debut album Alive Till I’m Dead, which includes collaborations with the likes of Lily Allen and Ed Drewett, is set to be one of the definitive urban albums of 2010.

Listen to a selection of upfront tracks from the album now on the Spotify Premium with the full album available from Mon 19th.

Selfmachine the brilliant new single from I Blame Coco is out now. To celebrate we are giving away an iPod Touch loaded with I Blame Coco music to a lucky Spotify listener. To enter simply create a Spotify playlist including Selfmachine and share it with your friends. Here’s how you do it:

create a playlist (including Selfmachine)

post your playlist as a comment to this blog

share your playlist with friends on facebook & twitter

The playlist with most subscribers wins the iPod Touch. Get sharing and good luck!

A lot of our developers are using Linux, obviously they want to listen to music while they’re coding away and looking at the feedback we get it appears that they’re not the only ones. So today we’re pretty happy to present a preview version of Spotify for Linux.

Built by our brilliant developers during hack days and late nights, it shares most of the same features as our Windows and Mac OS X desktop applications. Unfortunately, there are issues regarding decoding of local music on the Linux platform so we haven’t included support for local files in this version.

As a preview release this version is still unsupported, but we’re running it ourselves and will try to make sure it keeps pace with its Mac and Windows siblings. As we haven’t found a reliable way to display ads yet, this version is only available to Spotify Premium subscribers.

So how do you get it? Head over to our preview page where we’ve packaged the first release as Debian Squeeze/Ubuntu 10.04 package.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we do, and please keep the feedback coming!

UPDATE: Spotify for Linux is now also available for Spotify Unlimited subscribers.

After two hugely acclaimed albums (2005’s ‘Arular’ and 2007’s ‘Kala’), the global success of Paper Planes, Oscar nominations, and that ’Grammys performance, M.I.A is set to release new album ‘///Y/’, which sees her as incendiary and forward thinking as ever.

Recorded in Los Angeles, the album features production from Rusko, Diplo, Blaqstarr and Switch, a collaboration resulting in dubstep bass and grinding industrial noise being added to MIA’s unique armoury of sounds. ‘///Y/’, draws influence from our technologically changing world, now that our every thought and action is documented and posted for everyone to see. The album is an uncensored screen-grab of 2010.

Lovebox has quickly become one of the must-attend events on the summer festival circuit and takes place this year from the 16th-18th of July. Held annually in London’s oldest public park the festival was founded by DJs Groove Armada and continues to grow in size. Some of this year’s acts include the likes of Dizzee Rascal, Roxy Music, Paloma Faith, Grace Jones and many, many more.

As a special giveaway to Spotify Premium subscribers in the UK we’ve got a series of VIP tickets to hand out. In total we have ten pairs of two-day VIP tickets (valued at £150 each) and five pairs of three-day VIP tickets (valued at £180 each) up for grabs.

To enter to win – first ensure that your premium subscription is up to date, then create your ultimate festival playlist and submit it here on the blog along with a short reason why you want to attend. Entries must be submitted by this Friday, July 9th to be eligible.

Update: The winners have been picked and notified. Congrats to everyone who won!